Great Lakes speech and society (GLASS)

This project examines the vowels of English spoken in the Great Lakes region. The vowel system in this geographic area emerged from a series of sound changes known as the Northern Cities Shift. We have been compiling recordings of conversations with longtime residents in order to establish whether the Northern Cities Shift is continuing, stable, reversing, or being replaced with a new vowel system. We've also conducted some preliminary research on listeners' evaluation of Great Lakes speech. Our results to date converge with prior work in Chicago, IL and Syracuse, NY in that we find surprisingly little evidence for the expected Northern Cities Shift vowel configuration in its entirety. Furthermore, at least two vowels -- TRAP and LOT -- seem to have accumulated some social stigma.

The recordings in the Greater Lansing area are drawn from the Lansing AutoTown oral history archive, the IHELP-MI corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with college students, and short interviews with members of the public that we continue to collect on a rolling basis. We're comparing findings from Lansing with other ongoing research in:​

East Asian sociolinguistics

The Linguistics department counts expert phonologist of Chinese, Dr Yen-Hwei Lin, among its faculty, along with Dr. Karthik Durvasula, a phonologist with years of experience in fieldwork and experimental research. As a result, many of the Linguistics graduate students are pursuing projects on both phonetics/phonology and sociolinguistics. Some current and recent examples include:

Chenchen Xu's perceptual dialect mapping of China, presented at NWAV 44, and her ongoing experimental research on attitudes to 'Taiwanese' syllable contraction;

Xiaomei Wang's work on change in the tone system in Tianjin dialect, for which she has conducted more than 60 sociolinguistic interviews with a socially stratified sample of residents of the city. To be presented at NACCL 28;

This is a joint project with Dr. Sali Tagliamonte of the University of Toronto. Varieties of English around the world have seen a huge rise in the use of be like as a quotative verb (e.g. He was like, "Are you serious?") and new intensifiers such as so and super (e.g. I was so mad; She was super serious). But does use of these new forms increase over individual lifespans as well? We're looking at speech from young women recorded in high school, college and their mid-twenties to see what happens.